The poem you had scribbled on Your hand was washed away.

Yet you hold it to the bulb to transcribe, Somehow, that script of a moment’s sudden grief.

You had written of how you feel frozen Like a statue of limestone dissolving in the rain.

That slow vanishing taking as long as it had taken You to fashion this version of limbs, grin and gesture.

You called this a glass, a windshield of rock, a view That had cracked open like parched ground by repeated droughts.

All the cracks, since then accruing a secondary life; dead memories, Splattered insect bodies and wings, the hennaed pattern on your hand.

You had begun to wipe those lines away as soon as you wrote them, A turbid patina, rough, blistered with flying gravel, grating the bone.

However on the first touch of hand to the penis, you only leave the shape Of your hand in red ink, a Chinese seal that says “empty, hollow despair”.

But you don’t stop there, you don’t give up. You continue to polish With infinite patience, till you draw water from the old wells of wounding.

Till what was a rough ribbed stone, your sandpaper hand, Glitters like marble in the dark, a chip off Taj Mahal.

You turn it to your face, and see a mirror And nothing beyond it but your sweaty brown face.

Remember this well, this sweat is the tax That every stranger has to pay to become

Another exile!